The Death Of Opera

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 9:01 AM Eastern on 28 Aug. See below.]

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 12:48 AM Eastern on 27 Aug to sharpen the language.]

There is today a growing number of MSM classical music critics as well as ordinary operagoers who positively revel in the challenge of "unpacking" (to use their oft-used term) the meaning of Konzept Regietheater stagings of canonical operas as they might revel in the challenge of solving a clever rebus or acrostic; perverse stagings which today have become a pervasive practice worldwide. It never occurs to these equally perverse souls (or perhaps it's the very thing that does occur to them) that any staging of an opera — any opera — that requires unpacking in order to be understood
upends the very foundation of opera which seeks first and foremost to address itself directly to one's centers of feeling by virtue of its music rather than to one's intellect and is a veritable definition of what it means to be perverse in this context as such a practice reduces the music to the level of a mere (mostly inappropriate) soundtrack to the drama; a drama that rarely, if ever, bears any true relation to the drama created by the original opera's creator.

Is opera today fast coming face-to-face with its frequently trumpeted death as a unique artform?

Indeed, verily it is.

Update (9:01 AM Eastern on 28 Aug): See this S&F entry for an eloquent if coincidental validation of our above thoughts.